Writing to know what I think.

Self editing for writers

If you want to be be taken seriously you need to be able to write clearly, use good grammar, speling, and clear up as many tpyos as you can. Easier said than done. Three errors in that one sentence alone! The occasional typo might be forgiven, but if your work is littered with them, you can’t expect to win many readers to your cause.

The main problem with self editing is this: as a writer, you know what you think you’ve written. But writers also develop a blindness to their words, so they look at a sentence and overlay what is physically written with an image of what they imagine is written.

I’ve been dipping into my novel “Between the tides”, self published last year, and I’m still finding typos. Note to self: Must do better! I’m not big on hints and tips for writers, since I’ve hardly made the bigtime, and my work is frequently riddled with editing bugs that serve only to highlight my own shortcomings in this respect. But here goes:

1) Spell checkers are useful. Turn them on. Spellcheckers won’t correct bad grammar of course. “Their” “There” and “They’re” are all correctly spelled but so often found in the wrong places.

If you’re writing in English, stick to your native version. American English is most prevalent on the internet, but UK writers shouldn’t be confused or intimidated by that. Whatever your version, stick to it. Be consistent.

2) Show your work to someone else, and give them a red pen. They don’t need to be an expert, and you’re not asking them to comment on your style, nor even how good they think your work is. They’re simply a fresh pair of eyes, unblinkered by an author’s blindness to his own errors. I guarantee they’ll find errors you’ve missed.

Having said this, I don’t do it. It’s asking a lot – fine for a few thousand words, a short story or an article, maybe, but if it’s a two hundred thousand word novel, that’s a serious favour. If you’re like me then, you end up falling back upon your own sluggish wit. So:

3) Shake things up a bit. You’re used to seeing that text laid out in a certain way on screen, so before you run your eyes through it yet again, change the font. If the text is justified, unjustify it and vice versa. Change the paper size so the lines get chopped up a different way. Change the text and and page colour. If it’s a short piece, print it out – there’s nothing like printing out for highlighting your sins.

This re-presentation of a text means it will no longer fall into the subliminal patterns your brain has already made for it, so the occasional elusive typo has has a chance of poking you in the eye. Spot the mistake there? (double has)You probably did. I only found it on the umptheenth reading – decided to leave it in.

4) Don’t make it a chore. Remember, as writers, each time we run our eyes through a piece of text, we’re breathing life into it, we’re feeling the pulse and the rhythm of it, like playing a piece of music over and over, each time finding something new. And we get to change the notes as we go along, find new harmonies, new emphases, new shapes. It’s a stage in writing, and an enjoyable one. It just happens to be a good opportunity to spot our mistakes as we go along.

5) Let it cool. Don’t be in a hurry to publish. As a speculative or self publishing writer, your deadlines are imaginary anyway. Save your work, then forget it for a bit. If it’s a blog piece, don’t publish the same night. Leave it until tomorrow or the day after, or the weekend.

Allowing the writing to cool we also allow the subliminal patterns in our mind to dissolve, so next time we pick it up we no longer overlay a piece with what we imagine it says. We see exactly what it says, and that can sometimes come as a surprise.

After all of that, at some point we have to let it go. So trust in yourself, in fate, in the good nature of your reader, and and publish!

Editing is more than just tidying up typos of course – especially when we talk about writing fiction. That’s a complex business and people write books on it – use of passive language and adverbs, continuity, homogeneity and stuff like that, all of which I’m guilty of bodging, so the least I have to say about that the better.

Graeme Out

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9 Responses

Great thoughts and tips! Spending a whole career of 30 years as a technical writer in Silicon Valley, California, the things I got dinged for the most during engineer reviews of the documents I wrote, were not so much technical accuracy, but the dumb booboos I could not see because I was too close to them, as with seeing single trees in a forest. Lots of sloppy errors makes the reader think your writing is not creditable.

I found that I needed to brush-up on grammar rules all the time, as fellow writers during peer reviews of my documents often knew them better than me and would make snide remarks about my ability to write.

Hi Tom. Having read a lot of your prose, I’d say your 30 years of professional writing shows. I must admit when pointing out the bloopers in other people’s work, I try to be as sensitive as I can – definitely no snide remarks – otherwise I’m just asking to be embarrassed when others point out my own.

Thank you so much, Leanne. Coming from a pro I take that as a real compliment. I do love editing my stories – still getting pleasure out of running through stories I wrote decades ago. The question is: when do you stop? Thanks also for the re-blog.

Sure thing, Michael! I featured it on my Pen to Paper Communications Facebook page, too. What I love is the practical and dead-on good advice plus your honesty in saying “I don’t do it.” Haha!

As writers, our work is never truly done because our work can always be better. The more we write, the better we get, so we go back to those older pieces and improve them as we hone our skills.

I think we stop once we feel at peace knowing we’ve done the BEST we possibly can given the level of our skill at the current time and our goals for the piece.

If you want to publish, then as you say, just start sending it out trusting you’ve done your best. If the piece isn’t getting attention, then set it aside while you continue honing our craft… try again when you’ve become even better.